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Agustín Guillamón - From The Russian Revolution of 1917 To Stalinist Totalitarianism
Agustín Guillamón - From The Russian Revolution of 1917 To Stalinist Totalitarianism
The power in the streets, the real power, was held by the
Soviets, but they had no intention at all of doing away
with the government and assuming all power. Thus arose
what Trotsky called “the paradox of February”, that is,
that a revolution which had won in the streets gave way
to a government formed in the salons. The Pact between
the Petrograd Soviet and the Duma led to a republican
Provisional Government, with a Kadet majority and some
representatives of the Right Social Revolutionaries, such
as Kerenski. The social composition of the new
government had been changed from the nobility to the
liberal bourgeoisie.
The Soviets freed the political prisoners and organized
supply. The Czarist police force was dissolved, trade
unions were legalized, regiments that supported the
Soviets were formed, etc., without waiting for any
decrees to do so. The Government was limited to
ratifying the decisions made by the Soviets, which were
not decreed directly by the Government power because
the latter was dominated by a Menshevik and Right
Social Revolutionary majority that “completely ruled out
the possibility of demanding a power that the working
class was not yet capable of exercising” (Broué, p. 114),
in accordance with the previously-established analyses of
these parties with regard to the Russian revolutionary
process.
The Bolsheviks, led at the time by Kamenev and Stalin,
supported these dogmas. In Pravda a radical shift took
place when, in mid-March, Stalin took control of the
editorial committee of the newspaper, and the latter
began to publish numerous articles in favor of the idea of
continuing the war: “The Bolsheviks henceforth adopted
the theory of the Mensheviks according to which it was
necessary for the Russian revolutionaries to continue the
war in order to defend their recent democratic conquests
against German imperialism” (Broué, p. 115). At the
Party Conference of April 1, the Bolsheviks approved
Stalin’s proposal to “support the Provisional
Government”, as well as the possibility of a merger of the
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (Carr, Vol. 1, pp. 92-93).
These political positions were in opposition to the
popular will, which demanded the immediate end of the
war and its hardships. The declarations of the Foreign
Minister Milyukov with respect to the military
commitments to the allies and the continuation of the
war until final victory, provoked angry demonstrations,
which led to a government crisis that ended with
Milyukov’s resignation and the formation of a coalition
government made up of Kadets, Right SRs and
Mensheviks, with the latter two parties forming an
overwhelming majority. Kerensky was named as Minister
of War.
The new government was viewed with approval by the
allies, who understood the relation of forces in Russia
and wanted a strong government, one that could keep
Russia in the war.
The civil war began with the revolt, in May 1918, of the
Czechoslovakian Legion, composed of some fifty
thousand soldiers under French commanders. These
units proceeded westward, and soon reached the Volga.
The success of this operation led the Allies to intervene,
for the purpose of crushing the revolution and restoring
the Czarist regime.
In June, Anglo-French troops landed at Murmansk and
Archangel. In August, the Allies landed one hundred
thousand men in Vladivostok, on the pretext of helping
the Czechoslovakian Legion. In the South, the Czarist
general Denikin formed an army of volunteers with
British supplies and materiel: this was the origin of the
White Guard. In September, Trotsky, the creator of the
Red Army, obtained the first Soviet success with the
defeat of the Czechs and the reconquest of Kazan. In
1919 the French seized Odessa, the Ukraine and Crimea;
the English took over the oil wells of the Caucasus and
the Don Basin. Russian soil was also occupied by
American, Polish, German and Serbian troops. The
situation was desperate. Clemenceau’s plan to encircle
the Bolsheviks was fulfilled. But dissensions among the
Allies and the political incapacity of the generals of the
White Guard, who were incapable of making any
concessions of autonomy to the national minorities (a
question that was of interest to the Cossacks) or of land
to the peasants, in order to obtain their support, allowed
the Red Army to resist for the thirty months the civil war
lasted. Finally, the revolutionary wave that shook Europe
and the military successes of the Reds led to the signing
of another armistice. The civil war had left the country in
ruins. Private trade had disappeared (Broué, pp. 163-
170).
The measures known by the name of “war communism”
were therefore the results of the necessities imposed by
the war. In order to feed the besieged cities and the
army, harvests were requisitioned. The poor peasants
were organized against the Kulaks. There was no
government revenue, since the administrative apparatus
had disappeared. The uncontrolled printing of paper
money triggered inflation. Famine and epidemics
devastated the cities, which were the heart of the
revolution. Wages were paid in kind. The industrial
workers were sent to the battlefronts. The terror of the
political police (the Cheka) made its inevitable
appearance: nothing would ever be the same.
Industrial production plunged. The production of iron
and steel was minimal. Almost three-quarters of the
railroad lines were unusable. Land under cultivation was
reduced by one-fourth. The Kulaks killed their livestock
and concealed their harvests in order to prevent their
requisition.
It was in this context that the Kronstadt revolt took place,
at a naval base close to Petrograd with a proud Soviet
and Bolshevik tradition. In March 1921, Trotsky assumed
command over the suppression of the uprising of the
sailors of Kronstadt, who, during the revolution of 1917,
had been “the pride and glory of the revolution”, in
Trotsky’s own words. It was also during that month that
the 10th Congress of the Bolshevik Party banned
fractions and tendencies in the Bolshevik Party, and
when Lenin proposed the “New Economic Policy” (NEP).
During that same period, no less than fifty separate
peasant revolts were underway. The most important
revolt was that of the Ukrainian anarchist Makhno, who
controlled the entire Ukraine. The Party decided to
change its economic policy, but the armed repression of
broad, undoubtedly revolutionary sectors of the
population constituted a counterrevolutionary turning
point for the Soviet revolution. It was hardly surprising
that Kronstadt had been crushed for defending the
slogan, “Soviets without Bolsheviks” (Brinton, pp. 137-
144; Mett, pp. 39-116).
Conclusions
The greatness of Red October resides in the fact that it
was the first proletarian revolution in history, the first
time that the proletariat seized power, overthrowing the
government of the bourgeoisie. The communist
revolution can only be a world revolution, and it failed in
Russia when the revolutionary proletariat was defeated
in Germany and the Soviet revolution remained isolated.
This isolation, combined with the catastrophes of the civil
war, economic chaos, poverty and famine, magnified the
terrible mistakes of the Bolsheviks, among which the
identification of the Party with the State stands out,
which led to the inevitable triumph of the Stalinist
counterrevolution, carried out from the very ranks of the
Bolshevik Party that had inspired the Soviet Revolution of
October 1917. The Stalinist counterrevolution was
therefore of a political character, it destroyed all
political and ideological opposition, it harshly repressed
proletarian groups and movements that were
undoubtedly revolutionary, and persecuted to the
extent of physical extermination those who expressed
the least dissidence, whether within or outside of the
Bolshevik Party. In Russia, the revolutionary process that
had begun in 1905, obtained its first success with the
democratic revolution of February 1917, which
overthrew the Czar and established a democratic
republic, but did not stop halfway and continued to the
end with the insurrection of October 1917 in Petrograd,
in which the Soviets seized power, replacing the
bourgeoisie of the state apparatus.
The Stalinist counterrevolution was therefore of a
political character, and was embodied in the monopoly
of power held by the Bolshevik Party, in the form of
nationalization and state economic concentration (State
Capitalism) and in the transformation of the Bolshevik
Party into a Party-State.
Agustín Guillamón
[Text is not dated; the most recent publication date in
the Spanish-language bibliography at the end of the text
is 2006]
[Bibliography, which consists of Spanish language books,
is omitted from this translation—Translator’s Note]